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by 0xFFFF0000 3036 days ago
This is neat - remember using QuickBasic back in the day. Fun times.

I really wish Visual Basic would be open sourced from Microsoft, so the community would revive it. I still have fond memories programming with VB and the productivity it allowed - it had it's issues (oh, man...) but also made programming accessible.
2 comments
snuxoll 3036 days ago
QBasic got me interested in programming, I owe a lot to it even if by modern standards it's a pretty terrible language.

VB6 is dead though, everyone wants COM to die so even if MS open sourced it there's no real reason to continue putting effort into it. There are alternative that work reasonably well though, like Gambas (open source).

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cr0sh 3036 days ago
Actually, it's debatable on whether VB6 is "dead". Certainly not sold any longer, but Microsoft keeps including the runtime DLLs in Windows; they still exist in Windows 10.

The main reason is the sheer amount of software out there that businesses rely on to run their business, which they might not even have the source code to. Those that do have the code do hire people to maintain and extend the applications (shades of COBOL there).

It wouldn't surprise me to find out that new VB6 applications are being created - lots of people love it and loved using it (though I personally preferred VB5, because the compiler was separate from the rest of the system and could be used at the command line). VB.NET was widely viewed as a travesty to the language; some moved to C#.

What is strange is how few of these programmers seem to be aware of Gambas (and similar "VB-like" languages). I moved away from Windows at home in 1995 and move on to Linux; over time I became aware of other BASIC programming languages, but I moved away from BASIC as well, though it will always hold a place in my heart, since that's what I started out with.

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pjmlp 3035 days ago
VB.NET is widely used in life sciences labs, where most of the systems are Windows machines connected to devices like this one.

https://www.biotek.com/products/imaging-microscopy-cell-imag...

So researchers already used to VBA, usually get IT to install VB.NET and go from there.

However I have started to see a trend of them moving into R.

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cr0sh 3036 days ago
BTW - Microsoft will likely never open source VB, because it used and incorporated a ton of 3rd party stuff (pretty much all the VB versions did) - it's a licensing nightmare. The best they have done has been to keep the VB6 runtime DLLs available and installed (they're there on Windows 10).
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pjmlp 3035 days ago
Given that COM has become the heart of Windows APIs since Vista, and is how UWP components are compiled into, I doubt very much that it will die soon.
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pidg 3036 days ago
It's not open source or free, but check out Xojo - xojo.com - which is a kind of cross-platform spiritual successor to VB6.

Of course, Visual Basic lives on (as part of the free-as-in-beer Visual Studio).

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cr0sh 3036 days ago
Visual Studio has VB.NET - which is barely recognizable as VB for those of us who used VB6 or earlier back in the day (I started with VB3 on Windows 3.1).
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